The Super-Helper Syndrome : A Survival Guide for Compassionate People (eBook)

Authors’ Note

A psychotherapist with a pizza trying to connect with a self-harming boy behind his locked bedroom door.

A daughter crying in the car after leaving her screaming mother in a nursing home where she doesn’t want to be.

An emergency services operator with a backlog of 520 calls across the region trying to pacify an angry old man waiting for an ambulance for his neighbour.

A social worker searching for accommodation for a client with learning disabilities who had been raped in his home.

These are some of the people we spoke to when we were planning this book. Everyone knows helpers have to cope with traumatic and distressing events. We all know that in addition to the trauma, professional carers typically work prolonged hours with inadequate resources. They face abuse from members of the public or from those in their care. They put themselves in personal danger. And all of this for little monetary reward. During the Covid-19 crisis, their suffering became even more apparent. When Jess spoke to Nicki Credland, chair of the British Association of Critical Care Nurses, she told her that even ICU nurses, who are normally some of the most resilient, have been treated for post-traumatic stress disorder. Instead of one patient per nurse, they suddenly had to look after up to six. She said:

It’s just impossible to give quality care in that environment, so it has caused significant mental health issues in staff – feeling that they are not good enough, not doing their job well enough, not caring for their patients in the way they want to.

Absentee rates among healthcare workers have been at record levels. In the UK’s National Health Service, stress now accounts for over 30 per cent of sickness absence, but the problem existed long before the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2002, a US report on 10,000 nurses found that 43 per cent of them had high levels of emotional exhaustion. Unpaid carers are struggling too. There are around 6.5 million in the UK and their numbers have increased in the last couple of years. When 4,500 of them were surveyed in 2020, about 70 per cent reported negative impacts on their physical and mental health.

Deeper down, beneath all of this, there is something else that causes helpers to suffer. It lurks unnoticed. It is not about the challenges or level of trauma they face, though it can make those worse. It drags down everyday helpers and professionals alike and has to do with the very nature of helping. It dwells in the psychology of the helper. That is what this book is about.

This book is based on our experiences as practitioner psychologists and on years of discussing the ideas together. While we have sat side by side in front of a computer screen debating every single word, the concepts originally arose out of Jess’s work and are closely interwoven with her own life story. For this reason, we wrote the rest of the book in her voice.

In my early career in the health service and during the last fifteen years as a chartered psychologist, I’ve had the chance to work with hundreds of helpers. Some of them are in professional caring roles but many are not. Recent clients in my coaching practice have included a geologist, an accountant and a lawyer. Like many of the people you will meet in this book, they were 360-degree helpers. They were looking after others in every aspect of their lives: family, friends, those in their communities and strangers too. All of their jobs required helping as well.

In fact, it is hard to think of any job that doesn’t involve helping in some sense or another; perhaps that is the nature of work. How about the supermarket assistant passing down a jar from the top shelf; a festival steward pointing out the camping area; an academic encouraging a self-doubting student; or a boiler engineer replacing a thermostat? Helping is one of the most fundamental human behaviours. Once you start to look for it you find it everywhere: texting to ask how an interview went; setting up a new PlayStation for a friend; pointing a tourist towards the castle; throwing a tennis ball back over the fence. Helping is all around us. It is hard to think of any relationship that doesn’t involve it in some way or other. Perhaps that is the nature of life.

This book is about people for whom helping isn’t just a vocation; it is a way of life. Here are some of the things they’ve told me:

I sometimes feel I’ve spent my whole life looking after people … most of what I do in life is about helping … I feel guilty if I can’t help someone … ever since I was a child, I’ve done a lot for others… everyone comes to me with their problems.

As I got to know more of these people over time, two themes about their behaviour would not leave me alone. First, their tendency to help can become compulsive. Second, they are so focused on others, they overlook their own needs. I call this the Super-Helper Syndrome – where people feel compelled to help even to the detriment of their own wellbeing. Many of the clients I work with still take on requests for help long after their energies are depleted. They keep going when there is nothing left inside them, and they accept this as normal. They are tearful and frustrated by their own limitations to care for other people. They are reluctant to ask for help themselves because they believe their role is to provide. Only when they experience physical manifestations of stress or a state of collapse, do they finally accept help. This book offers practical advice on how to avoid being sucked into the Super-Helper Syndrome in the first place. For anyone who recognises the traits, I also offer ways out of unhealthy patterns of helping. Only by supporting their own mental and physical health can helpers have the strength to care for others in the way they long to.

The ideas in this book first began to take a hazy form nearly twenty years ago, when I was working as a qualitative researcher at Aston University. I lugged cumbersome rolls of flip charts up and down the country to facilitate focus groups with clinical staff to improve the questions in the NHS staff survey. In another project, I designed a stress-management programme as part of a European initiative for healthcare staff, presenting the UK findings in an icy room in the university hospital in Katowice, Poland. During my clinical psychology training, I worked on a project mapping the care of dementia patients in several nursing homes. In all of these settings I witnessed a dedication to helping. And in all of these settings I was alarmed at just how ready the staff were to put their own needs aside. I started to wonder why nobody ever questioned this; why the helpers themselves and everyone else simply accepted it.

The version of the Super-Helper Syndrome in this book comes from thousands of hours of coaching and working with the hundreds of people who have been through my online programmes. That time has given me ample opportunity to define and refine the set of solutions in this survival guide. I’ve also drawn on research in psychology and neuroscience to elucidate the processes underlying the Super-Helper Syndrome. I have tried to make the research accessible. In doing so, I have dared to draw conclusions from findings that are based on statistical tendencies. These conclusions are always debatable. In the behavioural sciences, especially, for every claim there is a counterclaim. That is the nature of science.

The word ‘syndrome’ is not meant to imply some sort of medical condition or personality type. I use it in the second sense given in my dictionary: a characteristic combination of opinions, emotions or behaviour. I have never labelled any of my clients as having Super-Helper Syndrome. I have coined the term as a useful moniker for the net effects of compulsive helping and not meeting your own needs. It’s a label for a combination of behaviours, not for a person. What I have found, again and again, is that when I describe the concept to people, it resonates with them. Putting a name to a problem can be a relief. It reminds someone that they are not alone. It hints that there is an answer out there. The term Super-Helper Syndrome is for people to self-identify. It’s not intended for typecasting others. The last thing I want is yet another label highlighting something wrong with certain groups, especially women, or blaming helpers.

This book is for all helpers, whatever their profession or gender, but I feel I should acknowledge that the majority of people in caring roles are women: 80 per cent of all jobs in adult social care are done by women. In her book, Invisible Women, Caroline Criado Perez points out that the majority of unpaid care work is also done by women. According to her, this isn’t simply a matter of choice. ‘Women’s unpaid work is work that society depends on, and is work from which society as a whole benefits,’ she writes. The philosopher Kate Manne has exposed how our society obligates women to offer care, affection, emotional support and more. In her book, Down Girl, she exposes the expectation that women be ‘human givers’ rather than human beings. She defines ‘feminine coded work’ as goods and services, such as care, concern, soothing and nurturing, that women are expected to provide. But I certainly don’t want to ignore all the men who are dedicated to helping. Plenty of the examples I’ve used came from them too. I want this book to be hospitable.

As I mentioned, my own natural habitat is qualitative research. That is the approach I’ve used to gather real-life examples for this book. Many amazing helpers...